'While the rest of the world burned,' billionaires made more money in 2017 than any other year in history
During a
year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive
effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening
human-caused climate crisis—from devastating hurricanes to deadly
wildfires and floods—one class of individuals raked in more money
in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world's
billionaires.
According
to the Swiss bank UBS's fifth annual billionaires report published on
Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4
trillion last year—an astonishing 20 percent—bringing their
combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.
"The
past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded
Age," the UBS report notes. "That period bred
generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to
influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for
more than 100 years."
UBS
estimates that the world now has a total of 2,158 billionaires, with
179 billionaires created last year. The United States alone is home
to 585 billionaires—the most in the world—up from 563 in 2017.
Meanwhile,
according to a June report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme
Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, 18.5 million Americans live
in extreme poverty and "5.3 million live in Third World
conditions of absolute poverty."
A
significant percentage of the "newly created" billionaires
are hardly the self-made men—and they are overwhelmingly men—of
popular lore. According to UBS, 40 of the 179 new billionaires
created last year inherited their wealth—a trend that has driven an
explosion of wealth inequality over the past several decades.
According
to UBS, this trend will continue to accelerate over the next 20
years, given that there are currently 701 billionaires over the age
of 70.
"A
major wealth transition has begun. Over the past five years
(2012–2017), the sum passed by deceased billionaires to
beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17 percent each year,"
the UBS report concludes. "Over the next two decades we
expect a wealth transition of $3.4 trillion worldwide—almost 40
percent of current total billionaire wealth."
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